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- Description is exactly "A series of 1899 Florence and Tuscumbia newspaper articles reporting on the alleged rape of white teenager Marietta Hayes by sixteen-nineteen year-old African-American John Wesley "Wesley" Barnett some seven miles north of Florence near Little Cypress Creek, where Cloverdale Road crosses it.
Young Barnett accosted Miss Hayes on Thursday morning about 9 am, as she was out picking blackberries a half-mile from her home; when the girl screamed Barnett forcefully covered her mouth with his hand, bruising her mouth but not otherwise injuring her.
Hearing the girl's screams her mother ran to investigate and Barnett ran off but was tracked by Lauderdale Sheriff AD Carson and Deputy Price Abernathy to his father Emanuel Barnett's house on the Van Buskirk Place near Florence, some three miles from the scene of the alleged assault, though apparently Sheriff Carson had to threaten to shoot one of Barnett's brothers before Barnett could be apprehended.
As there was a large party of men in the neighborhood who had gone out searching for Barnett, Sheriff Carson had the boy transferred to the Colbert County jail in Tuscumbia hower Colbert County Sheriff Grisham, fearing a possible lynch mob in Tuscumbia, had the boy transferred to Russellville, in Franklin County, where he remained until his trial in December of 1899.
Barnett, who repeatedly insisted he only "meant to hug and kiss the young lady," was judged to be "an ignorant and almost half-witted youth," thus was only sentenced to six years in prison, a sentence judged "by those who have seen him to be commensurate with his understanding of the crime he committed in attempting rape," but which seems somewhat excessive now. His prison term was to have expired December 1, 1905 unless he got out early, that date being June 1, 1904. Unfortunately John Wesley Barnett died of dysentery on March 10, 1900 at the mines in Coalburg., in Jefferson County, AL, where he was sentenced to work."
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